Zach Pollakoff, Heavy Duty Projects
💭 Thoughts on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, how to actually describe music, and Substack as a remedy for Instagram addiction.
Zach Pollakoff is the Emmy-award winning Executive Creative Producer at Heavy Duty Projects, a company that sources and creates music for film, TV, video games, and commercials. He is also the founder of the long-running Twosllable Records and Upstate NY conference, Likeminds Camp. Before Heavy Duty, Pollakoff was the VP/Senior Music Producer at Grey Global. His first job in NYC was College/Non-comm Radio + Video Promoter at Beggars Group. After 15yrs in NYC, Pollakoff now resides in bucolic Charlotte, VT with his wife and two kids where he continues to curate shows at Bauschaus VT, perform as Narrow Shoulders, DJ at Paradiso, release photography zines, publish poetry, and scheme one-off merch drops under the name Banana Belt VT.
🎯 Current focus
I’m finishing up a zine I’ve been working on for the past 15 years. It’s a collection of film photographs of the steam towers around Manhattan…I have hundreds of them by now. A New Atmosphere is a 50 page, staple-bound, hand-numbered book of photography designed by a friend I met at Likeminds, complete with a silk-screened cover I made to look like a steam tower. I’m working on throwing a show in NYC this summer with 12 framed prints, a short film, and an installation piece…if you have any ideas of where to throw it I’m all ears!
📖 Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity
A few weeks ago I was on a work trip to NYC and I saw my therapist IRL, which I do when I’m in town. Without going into detail, he introduced me to the phrase, “stewing in the ambiguity,” a kind of peace one can find in a contradiction.
A few hours later, I stopped by Françios Ghebaly on the LES to see my friend Ross Simonini’s painting show. I had been in his Altadena, CA studio while he was working on these pieces and so it was magic to see them now framed in a gallery in New York. Ross makes these long painted scrolls by writing a mantra all over a canvas and then filling in the negative space with imagery until the mantra disappears and he forgets it completely. The paintings are imbued with the mantras’ meaning without the viewer ever knowing what it was.
The gallery attendant (was it Françios? I never found out…) and I both lamented over the fact that despite being told not to seek them, we were sure we could find letters jammed between the cartoonish faces and colorful milk-washed landscapes, missing the point entirely. I told him about “stewing in the ambiguity” and he asked me if I’d ever read Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.
I ran back to the hotel in the rain and listened to a 30min podcast about it, reading snippets from the text about how she believed in Sartre’s vision of Nihilism (they dated, after all), but there is an inexorable quality of being alive that weaves an unbreakable interconnected web between us all and we have no choice but to accept that contradiction.
That night, I had dinner with friends in town from Austin at Diner in Williamsburg. I was reliving countless memories in that room over wine, and on my way out, I saw an old Likeminds friend, Joel Evey in a booth by the bathroom. He was embroiled in a deep philosophical conversation with a friend I’d never met about the ontological nature of being and so I shared de Beauvoir’s ethical take on Ambiguity and, in a way, it proved her whole damn point :-)
🕉️ Advertising mantras to live by
Working in the music for advertising space as long as I have, I’ve developed a couple mantras, truisms, observations, essential questions, or whatever you want to call them that guide the very collaborative work I do every day:
🎶 1. People don’t like music, they like the people that make it
For the most part, people don’t like music, they like the people that make it. As human beings we love to have an emotional connection with another person…we often love a piece of music because of the story we’ve been told about it and less so about its sonic characteristics. When we’re making music for picture, dialed in production, artistically crafted compositions, and tightened mixes are the baseline…what takes it to the next level is envisioning the exact person you imagine the target audience will fall in love with an embody their POV, whether you hear their voice or not.
🤭 2. In comedy, it can only be one
If you’re making comedy, only one thing can be funny. A funny script needs serious acting and earnest music. And an earnest script with funny acting…also needs earnest music! Pick a direction that feels honest to the characters on camera, even if it’s silly to you, and execute it to the highest degree possible and it will be funny as hell.
🗣️ 3. How to actually describe music
When talking about music, there’s nothing worse than a pile of jargon…nobody cares about the exact BPM, precise genre, or the niche instrument or plugin to use…especially non-musicians, who are often our clients. Instead, my first question on a creative call is always, “How should the viewer feel at the end of your spot, and who is that viewer?” Using emotion words is a common lexicon we all share and the tone of the conversation always shifts when the pressure is off to name 3 bands I think are cool.
🛒 4. At the end of the day, the customer is always right
Beyond music, the bulk of anyone’s job is customer service. At the end of the day I’m in a service industry and the customer is always right. I have a new practice I’d recommend when you receive a challenging email or text message: type out what you want to say, your gut instinct, all the vitriol inside and then delete it. Instead reply: “We’re on it!”
🗞️ Substack as a remedy for Instagram addiction
I’m obsessed with Substack. There’s finally an app, thank god, and so I’m training myself to replace my Instagram scrolling time with Substack scrolling time. It’s still a bit of a hot mess, The Wild West of the publishing world if you will, but there’s something appealing about that to me. In a way it is reminiscent of the early days of Tumblr, or my favorite tool in the blog heyday, Google Reader (RIP). I’m still hopelessly addicted to Instagram, a habit I’m working on, but Substack might be a (partial) remedy for now.
🚵 Just literally go outside
Also, as a part two to this thought… a helpless Instagram addict (the first step is acknowledging a problem), my favorite way to consume content is to just literally go outside. I happen to live in a really beautiful place, the woods south of Burlington, VT, and there’s really nothing more invigorating and inspiring than going for a walk on a trail I’m working on in my backyard, a dip in Lake Champlain, a bike ride to the Old Brick Store in my little town, a half day skiing at Bolton Valley, a hike to the top of Camel’s Hump, etc etc. All the memes are true that as you approach 40 suddenly you become a birder. My favorite sound in the world right now is the call of a Hermit Thrush, Vermont’s state bird. Lol.
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